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By Root 1247 0

status demanded of black people much more than the adoption or revelation of family names. Now that they were free, some thought the old pretenses and demeanor could be dropped. The need to cringe in the presence of whites or to respond obsequiously to their whims and petty humiliations seemed less compelling. Freedom, as a former Georgia slave defined it, meant taking “no more foolishment off of white folks.” Early in 1865, two white men were walking along a street in Helena, Arkansas, when they encountered a freedman. “How do ye do, Mr. Powell,” the black man greeted one of them. “Howdy, uncle,” Powell replied. Several months earlier, that familiar exchange of greetings would have terminated the conversation, but not in this first year of emancipation. Much to Powell’s astonishment, the black man cursed him, denied that he was his uncle, and made it clear that he did not permit such people to claim kinship with him. When Powell protested that he was only trying to be “civil,” the freedman angrily retorted, “Call me Mister.” And with that parting salvo, the men went their respective ways. The much-perturbed Powell turned to his companion and exclaimed, “Oh my God; how long before my ass will be kicked by every negro that meets me?”64

Comparable incidents and confrontations were bound to arise while former slaves explored the content of their freedom. This was the appropriate time, some of them thought, to give substance to their new status, even to challenge and revamp the traditional and seemingly inviolate code of racial etiquette. Of what use was a family name if white people seldom used it in addressing blacks, if they persisted in referring to adult black men and women as “boy,” “girl,” or “nigger,” while reserving the honorific titles of “auntie” and “uncle” for the venerable few. After emancipation, Emma Watson recalled, she perceived few changes in her status, except that the mistress both acknowledged and demeaned her freedom at the same time, as in the command: “Come here, you li’l old free nigger.” Even without the benefit of organized or coordinated action, freedmen and freedwomen made known their objections to these linguistic relics of bondage, some of them insisting that they be addressed by their surnames (preceded by the appropriate mister, missus, or miss), that they no longer be identified by the plantation or the master for whom they worked (as in Colonel Pinckney’s Ned), that they be treated, in other words, as mature men and women rather than as children or pets. For whites to address adult black men as “boys,” a black clergyman declared, was to evince a “spirit of malice” he deemed incompatible with the rights of free “colored men.” The use of such terms, he charged, assumed that a black man was little more than “a six-year-old stripling or a two-year colt,” and it reminded him of the Irishman who testified that “in the ‘ould counthry,’ when they whistled for him to come to dinner, he never knew whether it was himself or the hogs they wanted.” With unjustified optimism, the clergyman warned that “white or colored Christians” would no longer tolerate such terms of address.65

The problem defied any early resolution. Not only did whites persist in using the familiar terms of address but the blacks themselves found it difficult to discard the titles by which they had customarily known their former owners. As slaves, they had addressed them as “master” and “mistress,” or even more familiarly as “marster” or “mars” and as “mistis,” “miss,” or “missy,” usually followed only by the Christian name, as in “Miss Ann” or “Mars Bill.” Customarily, they had used titles like “boss,” “cap’n,” “major,” and “colonel” in addressing white men of high rank with whom they were less acquainted. (The term “boss” might be reserved for whites who were neither slaveholders nor “poor buckra.”) After learning of his freedom, a Georgia black wanted to know, “You got to say master?” to which a fellow freedman responded in the negative. “But they said it all the same,” Sarah Jane Paterson recalled. “They said it for a long time.